She could trust in the patterns of FBI officers, or her colleagues. But Tam? Her heart trusted, clearly it did. She wouldn’t be carrying evidence out of the building if it didn’t. Her heart didn’t just trust, either. There was more, a very dangerous something more—an impossible something more. She wasn’t going to name it, because if she did it would think it had found a home.
Don’t believe in the impossible, she warned herself. She hurried out of the building lobby, bursting into the sunlight of the bright autumn day. The canopy of sky was brilliantly blue.
She loved the way the sun felt on her face. Her feet nearly flew down the street, her body feeling light, at complete odds with her heavy thoughts, and in spite of the thirty pounds of paperwork she was carrying.
She saw Tam before Tam spotted her. Tam’s dark jacket 133
seemed loose on her shoulders while her face was pale, all angles and sharp edges. Tam was scanning the street. Then their gazes locked and Tam grinned.
Kip found herself grinning back. “I’ve decided you’re guilty,”
she announced.
Tam was clearly taken aback, but said only, “My car is this direction. Let’s get some place that feels a bit safer than this and confer.”
She fell into step alongside her. “I will work as diligently as possible to prove you did it.”
“Okay.” Tam gave her a sideways glance. “This is good news?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t much of a moment of clarity, but it was something. “My suspicion is an asset. I can think like Tamara Sterling, a rather inept embezzler, and possibly anticipate the next set of evidence against you. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if tickets to take you from here to Brazil turned up next.”
“I might be able to trace back an air reservation.”
“There’s lot of other work to do first—I’m just saying. You’re guilty and I’m here to prove it. That means I stick to you like glue.”
Tam’s grin froze before it was fully formed. She gestured Kip into the next store.
“What? Do you need incense? Patchouli?” Kip coughed at the other smells hanging in the air of the tiny crystals and herbals shop. Her mild allergy to sandalwood made her eyes water.
“There’s a car behind my car that I think is official business.”
“They can’t have a warrant yet.”
“But that doesn’t mean I can’t be detained until they do, for any number of time-wasting reasons. Right now, time is what we don’t have. The tampering fingerprints are going to disappear. I was going to copy them last night but I got...distracted.”
Kip wondered what that meant. “Well, the agent I overheard wasn’t looking to haul you in for questioning. I think they were just going to ask you a few questions but when Mercedes stonewalled them it got more about ego.”
134
“I’m glad there’s somebody relatively calm involved, but I doubt he’s in that tan sedan.”
“I had a blue sedan following me.” She tried to get an angle to look down the street past Tam’s car, but she wasn’t tall enough.
Not like seeing the car mattered—white, tan and blue were standard issue.
Tam took off her jacket and relieved Kip of her heavy satchel.
“Put my jacket over yours. From the back we might look like different people than the ones who came in.”
“The height...”
“I know. Mutt and Jeff here. We have to leave separately. Me first.”
Kip opened her mouth to protest, but Tam went on, “If they’re going to seize me I don’t want you taken in too on some trumped-up obstruction charge. And they can have all the evidence. I want them to have it. I just don’t want them to have me.”
Tam now had all the reports Kip had independently collected.
A suspicious person might think this was a ploy to dump it. For entirely unsuspicious reasons Kip said, “Don’t you dare try to ditch me.”
The smile she got was lopsided. “Not yet.”
As Tam left she muttered, “I’d like to see you try.”
She ticked off thirty seconds on her watch. Hearing no alarm and seeing no blue-suited figures in nonchalant pursuit of Tam, she meandered out of the shop, paused to window-shop and slowly made her way down the street and around the corner. Her heart sank into her stomach until she spotted Tam sitting on a bench, face turned upward to the sun in the classic Seattle tan-while-you-can pose.
“So what do we do now?”
Tam opened one eye, still looking the picture of lunchtime relaxation. “I probably should ditch you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This isn’t a movie, Kip.”
“I know that.”
Tam met her gaze. “This isn’t where you defy authority and 135
save the planet and the audience gives you a standing ovation at the end, all crimes expunged.”
“I know. And I’m not going anywhere. You’re my prime suspect. It’s my duty.”
“You could go to the FBI and tell them what you know. Just put it out there. And walk away, because you haven’t done a single thing wrong.”
“And I still haven’t. It’s perfectly lawful for me to go into the parking garage and get my car.”
Tam’s eyes darkened to a steel-gray. “Will you promise me that if you’re challenged, you’ll cooperate? Give them every hunch and idea you’ve had?”
Kip swung the heavy satchel over her shoulder. “Okay, we’ll let the FBI decide what I do next. But if I pull up in my car in the next five minutes, you’re getting in.”
Tam watched Kip’s trim figure, lopsided from her heavy load, walk briskly toward the parking garage and out of her sight. In spite of her promise, she seriously considered walking away. She could probably get just as far on her own, and not endanger Kip while she did it.
She didn’t want to run so far that Kip couldn’t find her.
Besides, she had no reason to run She was innocent. All she needed was a few more days, maybe forty-eight hours total. Just because Kip had overheard a threat of a warrant to arrest her didn’t mean that a warrant yet existed, or that one ever would exist. Leaving the area wasn’t a crime.
But it would surely look guilty. Because she was an ex-agent, there would be those who would make her a priority—she knew how they felt about their own gone bad. They’d sift through her life. What if someone else finally stumbled over what Kip had and brought up her lack of proof of identity? Wanted to know where she’d spent her childhood? Fine, well, she hadn’t ever wanted it to be public information, but disclosure in the context of a criminal 136
investigation was the last way she’d ever wanted her parentage to come to light. The court of public opinion took the flimsiest of suspicions and indicted a person’s entire life these days. It would only take one well-financed blogger with advertisers to please to do her in, like those slimy people at SLY. Witch hunts sold ads and drew site visitors and the pay-per-click income. Throw the word lesbian in with those sorts of words and, oh, look at the Web hits pile up.
When Kip’s car issued from the garage exit down the street and merged carefully over to the curb where she was waiting, her emotions were as chaotic as oceans meeting. When she felt like this she had always been able to calm herself, but that had backfired spectacularly last night. She would have to live with the cacophony. Pleasure wasn’t hard to handle, and it was undeniably pleasurable to see Kip. But there was worry and concern, too.